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Hudson Valley's Dead Cast Their Votes
Steven T. Vermilye was a home inspector and general contractor who grew up in Westchester County, went to college in Texas and settled in New Paltz in 1971.David S. Stairs was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1927, where as a 16-year-old he pounded hot rivets into the New York Central Railroad at Croton-Harmon and then spent 45 years working his way up through Texaco's research center in Glenham. Betty L. Johnson came from a small town in Virginia and moved to Beacon when she was 17, raised eight children while boxing duct tape at Tuck Tape and working in the kitchen at the Castle Point veterans hospital. The three mid-Hudson Valley residents had little in common during their lives, but share one thing now: They all have records of casting a vote after they had died. The new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis. The Journal's analysis is the first to examine the potential for errors and fraud in New York's three-month-old database. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File," a database of 77 million records of deaths dating to 1937. The state database was current as of Oct. 4, the master death index through the second quarter of 2006. The same process has been used to identify deceased registrants in other states, but is not yet being used in New York. The numbers do not indicate how much fraud is the result of dead voters in New York, only the potential for it. Typically, records of votes by the dead are the result of bookkeeping errors and do not result in the casting of extra ballots. The Journal did not find any fraud in the local matches it investigated. "Of course we are concerned about people voting if they are dead," George Stanton, chief information officer for the state Board of Elections, said in an e-mail response. Stanton said an updated version of the voter list is under development. "Any tool that will help us maintain a more accurate voter list will be considered for use," Stanton said. Among the Journal's findings: The Journal identified dead people on the voter rolls in all 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died. Posted by: lotp 2006-10-29 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=170154 |